[kj] Killing Joke was right

[Alex Smith]

What a CHILLING story.

Sorry.

Alex in NYC


-----Original Message-----
From: GregSlawson at aol.com
Sent: Nov 21, 2005 12:25 AM
To: gathering at misera.net
Subject: [kj] Killing Joke was right

"I was born to see 2,000 years 
Of man's effect upon the planet
Extinction seems to be a plausible risk
Whatever happens well I'm part of all this."

"I can see tomorrow/I can see the world to come
I can see tomorrow/Hear the pandemonium"

Published on Sunday, November 20, 2005 by the lndependent/UK 
    
The Big Thaw: Global Disaster Will Follow If the Ice Cap on Greenland Melts
Now scientists say it is vanishing far faster than even they expected.

    
by Geoffrey Lean
    
    
Greenland's glaciers have begun to race towards the ocean, leading scientists 
to predict that the vast island's ice cap is approaching irreversible 
meltdown, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. 


Lines on this satellite image of Greenland's Helheim glacier show the 
positions of the glacier front between 2001 and 2005. Image: I. Howat et al.
    
Research to be published in a few days' time shows how glaciers that have 
been stable for centuries have started to shrink dramatically as temperatures in 
the Arctic have soared with global warming. On top of this, record amounts of 
the ice cap's surface turned to water this summer.

The two developments - the most alarming manifestations of climate change to 
date - suggest that the ice cap is melting far more rapidly than scientists 
had thought, with immense consequences for civilisation and the planet. Its 
complete disappearance would raise the levels of the world's seas by 20 feet, 
spelling inundation for London and other coastal cities around the globe, along 
with much of low-lying countries such as Bangladesh.

More immediately, the vast amount of fresh water discharged into the ocean as 
the ice melts threatens to shut down the Gulf Stream, which protects Britain 
and the rest of northern Europe from a freezing climate like that of Labrador.

The revelations, which follow the announcement that the melting of sea ice in 
the Arctic also reached record levels this summer, come as the world's 
governments are about to embark on new negotiations about how to combat global 
warming.

This week they will meet in Montreal for the first formal talks on whether 
there should be a new international treaty on cutting the pollution that causes 
climate change after the Kyoto protocol expires in seven years' time. Writing 
in The Independent yesterday, Tony Blair called the meeting "crucial", adding 
that it "must start to shape an inclusive global solution". But little 
progress is expected, largely because of continued obstruction from President George 
Bush.

The new evidence from Greenland, to be published in the journal Geophysical 
Research Letters, shows a sudden decline in the giant Helheim glacier, a river 
of ice that grinds down from the inland ice cap to the sea through a narrow 
rift in the mountain range on the island's east coast.

Professor Slawek Tulaczyk, of the Department of Earth Sciences at the 
University of California, Santa Cruz, told the IoS that the glacier had dropped 100 
feet this summer.

Over the past four years, the research adds, the front of the glacier - which 
has remained in the same place since records began - has retreated four and a 
half miles. As it has retreated and thinned, the effects have spread inland 
"very fast indeed", says Professor Tulaczyk. As the centre of the Greenland ice 
cap is only 150 miles away, the researchers fear that it, too, will soon be 
affected.

The research echoes disturbing studies on the opposite side of Greenland: the 
giant Jakobshavn glacier - at four miles wide and 1,000 feet thick the 
biggest on the landmass - is now moving towards the sea at a rate of 113 feet a 
year; the normal annual speed of a glacier is just one foot.

The studies have found that water from melted ice on the surface is 
percolating down through holes on the glacier until it forms a layer between it and the 
rock below, slightly lifting it and moving it toward the sea as if on a 
conveyor belt. This one glacier alone is reckoned now to be responsible for 3 per 
cent of the annual rise of sea levels worldwide.

"We may be very close to the threshold where the Greenland ice cap will melt 
irreversibly," says Tavi Murray, professor of glaciology at the University of 
Wales. Professor Tulaczyk adds: "The observations that we are seeing now point 
in that direction."

Until now, scientists believed the ice cap would take 1,000 years to melt 
entirely, but Ian Howat, who is working with Professor Tulaczyk, says the new 
developments could "easily" cut this time "in half".

There is also a more immediate danger as the melting ice threatens to disrupt 
the Gulf Stream, responsible for Britain's mild climate. The current, which 
brings us as much heat in winter as we get from the sun, is driven by very 
salty water sinking off Greenland. This drives a deep current of cold ocean 
southwards, in turn forcing the warm water north.

Research at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts has 
shown, that even before the glaciers started accelerating, the water in the North 
Atlantic was getting fresher in what it describes as "the largest and most 
dramatic oceanic change ever measured in the era of modern instruments".

Even before these discoveries, scientists had shortened to evens the odds on 
the Gulf Stream failing this century. When it failed before, 12,700 years ago, 
Britain was covered in permafrost for 1,300 years.